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@ -36,11 +36,79 @@ solution. The system is now ready for production testing at our university.
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Analysis
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--------
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### Current solution at MFF UK
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### Assignment
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The major goal of this project is to create grading application that will be
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used for programming classes at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles
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University. However, the application should have modular design and be easily
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extendable, so other kinds of usage will be possible.
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This project have a great starting point -- there is an old grading system used
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these days at out university, so its mistakes and weaknesses can be adressed, and
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a lot of teachers willing to use the new system. The ideas were collected both
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from our personal experience with old system and from requests of some teachers.
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**Common grading system features:**
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- creating exercises including textual description, sample inputs and correct
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reference outputs (for example "sum all numbers from given file and write the
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result to the standard output")
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- assign the exercise to a group of users with some additional properties like
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deadlines set
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- user interface for interaction with the system, mainly for showing assigned
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exercises, uploading solution sources and presenting evaluated results
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- safe environment to execute student solutions withing prescribed time and
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memory limits and check corectness of outputs
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- assigning points to users depending of correctness of his/her solution
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- user management with support of roles (at least two -- _student_ and
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_supervisor_)
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- administrative interface for manual checking of solutions, overriding
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automatically obtained amount of points and view overall statistics about
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users
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Schools and educating institutions needs a bit specific setup. System
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configuration needs to reflect structure of courses and user hierarchy
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(_student_, _supervisor_ and _administrator_). These requirement are satisfied
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with currently used system at the university, but there are some new ones, which
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escalated during long production lifetime of old system. From student
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perspective there are not many thing to improve, but a lot of them come from
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administrator and supervisors. Collected ideas are from meeting with faculty
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staff involved in current system.
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**Wanted features for new system:**
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- keep it simple as possible
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- login through university authentication system
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- support of multiple programming environments at once to avoid unacceptable
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workload for administrator and hardware occupation
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- localization (both UI and exercises)
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- Markdown support for exercise texts
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- tagging exercises and search by tags
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- comments, comments, comments (exercises, tests, solutions, ...)
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- edit student solution and privately resubmit it
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- resubmit solution with saving all results
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- mark one student solution as accepted (used for grading this assignment)
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- web and command-line submit tool
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- SIS integration for fetching personal user data
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- plagiarism detection
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- advanced low-level evaluation flow configuration with high-level abstraction
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layer for ordinary configuration cases
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- use of modern technologies with state-of-the-art compilers
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@todo: some conclusion
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The ideas presented above are not completely new. There was a group of
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students, who already implemented an evaluation solution for student's
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homeworks in 2006. Its name is [CodEx - The Code
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### Related projects
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First of all, some code evaluating projects were found and examined. It is not
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a complete list of such evaluators, but just a few projects which are used
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these days and can be an inspiration for our project. Each project from the
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list has a brief description and some key features mentioned.
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#### CodEx
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There already is a grading solution at MFF UK, which was inplemented in 2006 by
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group of students. Its name is [CodEx - The Code
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Examiner](http://codex.ms.mff.cuni.cz/project/) and it has been used with some
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improvements since then. The original plan was to use the system only for basic
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programming courses, but there is demand for adapting it for many different
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@ -79,33 +147,6 @@ several drawbacks. The main ones are:
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which have a more difficult evaluation chain than simple
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compilation/execution/evaluation provided by CodEx.
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Supervisors and current users of CodEx gives us following ideas for
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improvements:
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- keep it simple
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- localization (both UI and exercises)
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- Markdown support for exercise texts
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- tagging exercises and search by tags
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- comments, comments, comments (exercises, tests, solutions, ...)
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- edit student solution and privately resubmit it
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- resubmit solution with saving all results
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- mark one student solution as accepted (used for grading this assignment)
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- command-line submit tool
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- SIS integration for personal user data
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- plagiarism detection
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After considering all these facts, it is clear that CodEx cannot be used
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anymore. The project is too old to just maintain it and extend for modern
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technologies. Thus, it needs to be completely rewritten or another solution
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must be found.
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### Related projects
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|
|
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|
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First of all, some code evaluating projects were found and examined. It is not
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|
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|
a complete list of such evaluators, but just a few projects which are used
|
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|
|
|
these days and can be an inspiration for our project. Each project from the
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list has a brief description and some key features mentioned.
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#### Progtest
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[Progtest](https://progtest.fit.cvut.cz/) is private project from FIT ČVUT in
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@ -157,6 +198,11 @@ recruiters and also some universities.
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### ReCodEx goals
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After considering all these facts, it is clear that CodEx cannot be used
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anymore. The project is too old to just maintain it and extend for modern
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technologies. Thus, it needs to be completely rewritten or another solution
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must be found.
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From the research above, we set up several goals, which a new system should
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have. They mostly reflect drawbacks of current version of CodEx and wishes of
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MFF users. No existing tool fits our needs, for example no examined project
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